Is Joining a Church as a Member Actually Necessary?
What Is Church Membership?
What exactly is church membership? Church membership is how we formally recognize and commit to one another as believers. It’s the thing we create by affirming one another through the ordinances. To offer a definition, church membership is a church’s affirmation and oversight of a Christian’s profession of faith and discipleship, combined with the Christian’s submission to the church and its oversight.
The word submits is scary, perhaps especially when applied to the church. But it must be said. When you become a church member, you’re not just submitting to the leaders or the “institution” in some vague bureaucratic sense. You’re submitting to a family and all its members. It’s your way of saying, “This is the particular group of Christians I’m inviting into my life and asking to keep me accountable for following Jesus. I’m asking them to take responsibility for my Christian walk. If I’m discouraged, it’s now their responsibility to encourage me. If I stray from the narrow path, it’s their responsibility to correct me. If I’m in dire financial straits, it’s their responsibility to look after me.”
Yet this commitment goes both ways. In asking the other members of the church to look out for you, you also are promising to look out for them. You are now a part of the “church,” which is affirming and overseeing others. We’ll come back to this point in a moment.
Rediscover Church
Collin Hansen, Jonathan Leeman
Rediscover Church is a timely reminder that the church is more than just a livestream—it is an essential fellowship of God’s people furthering God’s mission.
What should also be evident—if you’ve been paying close attention—is that baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and church membership belong together. Exceptions exist, yet ordinarily churches baptize people into membership, and the Lord’s Supper is a privilege of church members, whether at one’s own church or when visiting another. After all, all three things work together to do the same thing: affirm and mark off the people of God. Together they declare to the nations of the earth, “Here are the citizens of the kingdom of heaven.”
Isn’t It Enough to Belong to the Universal Church?
Sometimes people like to say, “I don’t need to join a church. I already belong to Christ’s universal church.” (The universal church is what theologians call the entire body of Christ throughout the world and throughout all history.) Is that right? Can we forget about the local church since we all become members of the universal church upon conversion?
The short answer is no. It’s true you don’t need to join a church to be saved. Our membership in the universal church is a gift (Eph. 2:11–22), just as our righteousness in Christ is a gift and faith is a gift. Yet you do need to join a church to be obedient to Scripture. Just as our faith should “put on” good works (Col. 3:10, 12; James 2:14–16), so we should “put on” our universal membership locally. Our membership in the universal church cannot remain an abstract idea. If it’s real, it will show up on earth—in real time and space with real people with names like Betty, Jamar, Saeed, and Ling. Pandemic lockdowns don’t change any of that.
If the Spirit is in you, you want to commit to Christ’s body. You almost can’t help it. Genuine membership in the universal church creates local church membership, which in turn demonstrates our universal membership.
Perhaps, like us, you’ve had friends who tried to live out their Christianity apart from a church, and little by little their faith shriveled, sometimes disappeared entirely. I had a friend whom I encouraged to join my church after he had been attending for several months. He declined because he didn’t want the accountability. Meanwhile, he was dabbling in significant sin. Unsurprisingly, his attendance grew more and more sporadic, until he stopped attending altogether. Finally, he told me one day over coffee, “Jonathan, I’m no longer a Christian, or at least not your kind of Christian.”
Church membership offers the safety of the sheep pen, where Christ is shepherd. It offers the nourishment of being attached to a body, like an arm to a torso, where Christ is the head. It offers the love of a family, where Christ is the firstborn of many heirs. It offers the obligations and duties of citizenship in a holy nation, where Christ is the King.
Genuine membership in the universal church creates local church membership, which in turn demonstrates our universal membership.
Is Church Membership Really Biblical?
Another question people ask is whether church membership is even in the Bible. Maybe you’ve asked it yourself.
If we had only the length of an elevator ride with you to answer, we’d point to passages such as Matthew 18:17 and 1 Corinthians 5:2, where Jesus and Paul talk about removing someone from the church’s membership, or what Paul says about being “inside” the church (1 Cor. 5:12). Or we’d point to Acts 2 and what Luke says about three thousand people being “added” to the church in Jerusalem (Acts 2:41), or Acts 6 and what he says about calling the church together (Acts 6:2). No, the term “church membership” isn’t used in the Bible like we use it today. But the practice is implied nearly every time the word church is used in the New Testament, as when Luke says, “Earnest prayer for him was made to God by the church” (Acts 12:5), or Paul writes to “the churches of Galatia” (Gal. 1:2). Though they didn’t use all the tools we might use today, such as membership classes, membership packets, and names listed on a computer spreadsheet, they knew who they were—name by name.
Yet there’s the bigger story that’s important for you to see in order to understand God’s larger purposes for churches like yours or ours. Throughout the Bible, God always draws a bright line around his people. The garden of Eden had an inside and an outside. The ark had an inside and outside. The people of Israel in Egypt, quarantined off in Goshen, had an inside and outside. Just think about the plagues themselves. Some targeted just the Egyptians, not God’s people. God said,
But on that day I will set apart the land of Goshen, where my people dwell, so that no swarms of flies shall be there, that you may know that I am the Lord in the midst of the earth.Thus I will put a division between my people and your people. (Ex. 8:22–23)
Flies! God used flies to draw the line between his people and not his people! Then Israel traveled into the wilderness, and he gave them cleanliness laws in order to draw a line between the inside and outside of the camp. Unclean people had to go outside of the camp. Finally, he placed them in the promised land, which had an inside and an outside.
Rediscover Church Study Guide
Jonathan Leeman, Collin Hansen
Over the course of 9 lessons featuring guided study, Bible passages, and discussion questions, this companion to the book Rediscover Church emphasizes the significance of face-to-face fellowship with the family of Christ.
God has always marked off his people so that he might put them on display for his own glory. He wants these embassies to stand out. It’s no wonder Paul picks up this Old Testament language when he says,
Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said,
“I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
Therefore go out from their midst,
and be separate from them, says the Lord,
and touch no unclean thing;
then I will welcome you,
and I will be a father to you,
and you shall be sons and daughters to me,
says the Lord Almighty.” (2 Cor. 6:14–18)
When people ask whether church membership is in the Bible, they’re often looking for something programmatic, like membership to a gym or club. And, true enough, that’s not in the Bible. Let’s remove such ideas from our heads. Instead, let’s get into our minds “the temple of the living God,” which is the image Paul uses to describe who we are. This temple cannot be “yoked with” or have “partnership,” “fellowship,” or “accord” with unbelievers. Why? Because God dwells in this temple. He identifies himself with it. Yes, we should still invite nonbelievers into our worship gatherings (1 Cor. 14:24–25). But the point is, a church must be clear about who belongs to it and who doesn’t precisely for the sake of the church’s witness. He wants us to stand out and be distinct so that we can offer an attractive and compelling witness to the world.
As such, church membership is an assumed reality on nearly every page of the New Testament Epistles, but the language is different. Membership in the church is membership in a family. It comes with family obligations. It’s membership in a body. It comes with all the dynamics of being connected to every other part. Every biblical metaphor for the church helps us to understand what membership is, and all of them are necessary, because there is nothing else in the world like the church.
This article is adapted from Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential by Collin Hansen and Jonathan Leeman.
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